Home Secretary Theresa May added judges who allowed prisoners to remain were also guilty of reinforcing public perceptions of human right as "legal dodges that allow criminals to escape proper punishment and to continue to prey on the public.

This is not a dispute about respect for human rights, which I certainly agree is an essential part of any decent legal system.

It is about how to balance rights against each other: in particular, the individual's right to family life, the right of the individual to be free from violent crime, and the right of society to protect itself against foreign criminals.

Mrs May insisted that she was "a great admirer of most of the judges in Britain" and accepted the need for the power of government ministers to be "reviewed and restrained" by the judiciary.

"But the law in this country is made by the elected representatives of the people in Parliament. And our democracy is subverted when judges decide to take on that role for themselves."

Writing in the Mail on Sunday, Theresa May warned judges that primary legislation needs to be brought in to enable the Government to deport more foreign criminals.

Unfortunately, some judges evidently do not regard a debate in Parliament on new immigration rules, followed by the unanimous adoption of those rules, as evidence that Parliament actually wants to see those new rules implemented.

One judge, she noted, had justified his decision on the basis that the new guidance had been subject only to "a weak form of Parliamentary scrutiny".

It is essential to democracy that the elected representatives of the people make the laws that govern this country - and not the judges.

Yet some judges seem to believe that they can ignore Parliament's wishes if they think that the procedures for parliamentary scrutiny have been 'weak'. That appears actually to mean that they can ignore Parliament when they think it came to the wrong conclusion.